Families whose relatives died during an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease last year in Harlem sued New York City on Thursday, saying cooling towers at two city-owned sites had spewed dangerous bacteria.
Seven people died in the August 2025 outbreak and more than 100 were sickened.
The fast-growing outbreak originated in Central Harlem and was traced to two city properties — Harlem Hospital and a construction site for a city-owned public health laboratory. The lawsuits assert that the city and subcontractors failed to maintain cooling towers at those sites.
The lawsuits were filed in New York State Supreme Court by the lawyer Ben Crump and the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg. Mr. Crump and the firm are representing the families of five people who died and several who were infected and became ill.
Mr. Crump appeared on Thursday at a news conference about the suits alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist. The men were joined by lawyers from Weitz & Luxenberg as well as by family members of those who died or were infected during the 2025 outbreak.
“I’m a single mother now,” said Lakisha Plowden, whose fiancé, Bruce Scott, died after contracting Legionnaires’ while working at Harlem Hospital.
Mr. Scott left behind his 6-year-old daughter, Brooke, whom he was raising with Ms. Plowden.
“My daughter, she doesn’t want to leave my side unless she’s in school,” Ms. Plowden said. “She doesn’t want me to go anywhere outside, because the last time she saw her dad, he was leaving to go to the hospital and he never came back.”
Legionnaires’ is caused by the Legionella bacterium, which thrives in warm, stagnant water. In New York City, many outbreaks of the disease are linked to vapor spewed from rooftop cooling towers. The bacterium can cause severe pneumonia, especially in older people and those with chronic health problems.
“Protecting public health and safety is at the center of the city’s response,” Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s Law Department, said in a statement. “We will carefully review these cases.”
The subcontractors named in the lawsuits declined to comment.
Harlem Hospital, which is run by NYC Health + Hospitals, appeared to have been up-to-date on inspections of its cooling towers and in compliance with city rules, officials with the health agency said last summer.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, the agency’s president, said in 2025 that the hospital’s cooling towers had been inspected for Legionella multiple times, and by several methods, during the preceding year. But the Legionella bacterium is “ubiquitous” in the local environment, especially during the summer, he said, which means that no amount of testing can guarantee that it won’t appear in the warm, stagnant water of a cooling tower’s tank.
Cooling towers have been implicated in other outbreaks, including one this summer, when seven people died and more than 90 were infected on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Health authorities said the outbreak was associated with a cooling tower but have yet to pinpoint which tower was responsible. Officials said last week that the outbreak had ended.
As Legionnaires’ has grown more prevalent across the United States in recent decades, New York has emerged as an epicenter. That is partly because of the density of cooling towers — there are more than 5,000, mostly on rooftops in Manhattan — and the number of pedestrians on the sidewalks below.
On Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law a measure requiring twice-a-year certification of all New York City cooling towers.
The lawsuits brought by Mr. Crump, which name as defendants the City of New York, NYC Health + Hospitals and subcontractors responsible for maintaining the cooling centers, claim that the defendants “failed to properly test, treat and maintain the cooling towers, failed to comply with state and city cooling tower regulations, and failed to warn the public of the danger.”
The lawsuits join an earlier complaint filed in May against the city over the same outbreak.
Joseph Goldstein, Liam Stack and Davaughnia Wilson contributed reporting.